Category: Featured

The Audacy team. CEO Ralph Ewig is fourth from left. Credit: Audacy
PARIS — Start-up Ka-band intersatellite-relay service provider Audacy’s first satellite, Audacy Zero, was one of the 60-plus customers aboard the Spaceflight-managed SSO-A launch in December aboard a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
There has been no communications from the satellite since then, and while Audacy still hopes to be able to identify its satellite in orbit, four months after launch it looks like the satellite will be lost.
Audacy Zero, the first Ka-band cubesat to launch, was always intended as a prototype to be followed by a more-sophisticated version to be launched to the International Space Station. That launch has now been delayed to sometime this  year.
Audacy received a U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) operating license in June 2008, an event that helped trigger funding of around $11.1 million. Backers include Fidelity Investments’ Eight Roads Ventures, InnoSpring Seed Fund, Metatron Global and the Stanford StartX Fund.
Audacy says it has recently raised another $2 million through a convertible note. The company has signed letters of intent valued at more than $100 million with customers who think the idea of a three-satellite constellation in medium Earth orbit to handle downloads for thousands of satellites in lower orbit is a good idea.
Space Intel Report submitted two sets of questions to Audacy about its post-Audacy Zero status. Following is a condensed version of the company’s responses:
Audacy O is one of several SSOA-launched satellites that haven’t checked in. What is its status?
Unfortunately, we still don’t have a definite final identification. We’ve been able to narrow it down to 5 potential choices, with 2 strong front runners. There are still a couple of communication methods we are exploring, but it is looking likely at this point that we have a technical anomaly on the satellite. 
You’ve narrowed it down to a couple of leading choices for which satellite is yours, or narrowed down the possible causes of the non-communication? 
It’s narrowing down the possible IDs of the satellites that may be Audacy Zero.
At what point will the battery run down?
We fully tested Audacy Zero’s power system before launch, showing that the solar arrays should automatically deploy and start charging the batteries soon after deployment. Aside from an unexpected failure, we expect the battery to recharge and work well for about a year. 
What lessons do you draw from this — that adding RFID tags on follow ons would be advisable, or some other method to be able to distinguish it from other satellites? This is an industry-wide debate.
Matching signals to spacecraft, or tracked objects in space, can be very challenging with small satellites whizzing overhead with only a few minutes of communications access per day on their ground stations. We’ve heard many operators mention receiving signals from their satellites but not knowing exactly where they are.
Their ground stations are often custom-built, or do not have consistent standards for communicating with and tracking spacecraft. From what we’ve seen and experienced, there is a definite need to develop a consistent real-time communications network to simplify communicating with and identifying spacecraft. We plan to solve this problem using relay satellites to enable real-time communications and tracking for any satellite operator on our network.
How big a setback is this for your business plan?
Our goal for Audacy Zero was to develop a deeper understanding of the communications problems that our customers face. Audacy Zero was an experiment as the first fully Ka-band cubesat ever launched. We knew that there was a significant risk, but we didn’t fully appreciate the additional complexity in diagnosing any potential issues introduced by sharing the launch with so many other satellites.
Audacy Zero satellite. Credit: Audacy
In a way, we see this experience as further validation of the need for a standard space communications solution like the terrestrial mobile phone network, which has the means to uniquely identify any subscriber. 
Audacy’s relay network will certainly provide this type of capability once operational, but until that’s up and running, differentiating between individual payloads deployed in large shared missions will remain an issue that could drive people away from shared launch opportunities and toward dedicated small launchers instead. 
Audacy 0 was to be followed by the more-powerful Audacy Lynq, a payload to be launched to the International Space Station. What is its status?
The lessons learned from Audacy Zero have been valuable in the ongoing development of our radio for the space-based relays. We are taking those lessons and applying them to Audacy Lynq, which will feature the second version of our Ka-band radio that is scheduled to go to ISS later this year. 
That launch had been set for 2018. What caused the delay, and how firm is the late-2019 launch date?
The timeline for Audacy Lynq was pushed back as we wanted to incorporate the lessons that we learnt from Audacy Zero and make design changes to this second version going up to the ISS. We have not fixed a date but the expectation is to have it up by late this year. We have also experienced unexpected regulatory delays due to the novel and innovative nature of the Lynq mission.
You had planned to select a prime for its system by the end of 2018. Has that happened and if so, who is it and what’s the development schedule?
We have selected a prime to build a prototype of the relay satellite RF payload this year, but it is still a competitive process on who will be the final integrator so we can’t share with whom we are working with at this time. Our next milestone will be to evaluate the performance of the resulting hardware in ground testing, and then make a final commitment on the satellite build after that is completed.
It’s important to differentiate these two components in Audacy’s Network Architecture — the relay-satellite constellation, and the client terminal.
The relay-satellite constellation refers to the three MEO satellites that act like cellphone towers in space. The prime we referred to was the prime to build a prototype of the relay-satellite RF payload.
Do your future customers need to purchase terminals from you to enable their satellites to communicate with your MEO constellation? 
There are three options for clients to link to the Audacy network. The first is to  integrate the Audacy client terminal on their spacecraft. The second is to design their spacecraft’s communications system to comply with the Audacy Interface Control Document. The third is to reprogram a deployed spacecraft on orbit to achieve Audacy compatibility.
Audacy Zero was the first iteration of the client terminal and the ISS mission, Audacy Lynq, will be the second version of the client terminal. 
Audacy’s 7-meter antenna. Credit: Audacy
Last I checked you had raised some $11 million, with a Series B round in the works. Where are you now?
We have closed an additional $2 million in funding via a convertible note over the last 3 months, with participation from both existing and several new institutional investors. However, we are still in ongoing discussions to identify the right lead investor for our next round of equity funding. 
 And your ground station status? 
We have a sub-scale 2.4-meter teleport fully deployed and operational in Napa Valley, California. We’ve also completed factory acceptance testing of our first two 7-m antennas and expect ground-based commercial services to be operational later this year after they have been successfully deployed in the field.